Sisters beneath the skin

Rosemary Cooke is, in many ways, an ordinary girl raised in an ordinary family. Her father is a behavioral psychologist who always brings his work home, and her mother is his supportive better half. As the youngest, Rose admires her older brother, Lowell, and is jealous because she thinks he loves her sister, Fern, the most. In fact, Rose thinks everyone would pay more attention to her if Fern...

Blurring the line between fact and fiction

Karen Joy Fowler's fifth novel follows 2004's The Jane Austen Book Club, which was made into a movie last year. Wit's End offers themes similar to those found in that very popular book, but takes some mysterious and highly divergent paths along the way.Rima Lanisell is a 29-year-old high school teacher in Cleveland who has lost her whole family—her mother a long time ago to an...

A California comedy of manners

Anyone who has ever been part of a book club knows that it's not just about the books. It's about the wine and cheese and desserts and endless digressions. Sure the books are important, the glue that binds the thing together, but peel the metaphorical cover back and many stories unfold. That's because a book club is also about the...

here are two heroines in Karen Joy Fowler's new novel Sister Noon. One is the city of San Francisco, the other a plain, unmarried society woman living there in the 1890s. In a cityscape of wildly unscrupulous tycoons, and women ranging across the entire spectrum of respectability, Lizzie Hayes carries on her quiet but intense struggles against society's oppressive efforts to confine her...